Cupid and Psyche, Decadence, and Fairy Tales, 1885–1905

Abstract The famous fairy-tale-style version of the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ story in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), closely examined here, was not only a major motivation for the 1890s fairy stories of Oscar Wilde, but also an influence on the ‘Dutch Oscar Wilde’, the major novelist Louis Couperus, who in 1898 wrote a full and interestingly fantastic version of the ‘Cupid and Psyche’ story entitled Psyche. C&P is thus central to British Decadence, and leaves further traces in continental Decadence in the work of J. K. Huysmans and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Another British strand in this period is the work of Andrew and Nora Lang, which combined the early anthropology of the folk tale with the presentation of stories for children, both important for C&P as they presented it.